The first time they turned it on, the ratty smoke detector hanging tentatively from the two frayed wires snaking into my apartment's suspended ceiling, fell three inches from its perch and let out a wailing banshee cry lasting thirty seconds, but it was more like a trumpet blast announcing the end of the world to me and from that
moment at 2:31am when the super-collider began to shake the world even further off its axis than the Sumatran earthquake and tsunami had back in 2004, I had been unable to sleep at all.
I was not the only one affected.
Far below the great tunnels of steel and circuitry and mechanisms that would bring their confounded experiment to life, the sleeping ones also awakened and unlike me, impotent in my human form with my ever-increasing beer-gut and the swelling in my joints and the pain in my eyes where the glaucoma was settling in, they, with their pitch orbs and sharpened bone extensions resembling that yellow and black-clad X-Men character I can never remember the name of, they were angered to the point of vengeance and sabotage and they vowed that if ever they were awakened again before their time had come to be unleashed upon the face of the earth, that they would begin the battle before the appointed time and humanity would rue the day it tried to create a black hole.
The scientists in France and Switzerland postponed their experiments.
After all, what else could they do when the most important parts of the atom-whirling machine were breaking down as quickly as the particles that they were trying to collide?
In a few months it will be cool enough to start up again, cool enough to begin again the rumbling that will slowly and steadily move the planet another couple of degrees off its axis and the climate changes that come along with that shaking will be blamed on El Nino or La Nina or some other Latin name that we can come up with to explain away our latest super disasters, but far below the surface, when the snooze button wakes those little buggers again, no meteorologist will need to worry about tagging a name on the black death that spreads from Europe to Russia and across the once again frozen Bearing Strait, for the Chupacabra have already been named, they are already angry with us for interrupting their sleep and we humans are no more than goats, waiting for the reaping.
